In the secluded heart of a Hollywood backlot, a New York neighborhood lies in ruins. A rubble-strewn street, crushed cars jackknifed onto the sidewalk, storefronts coated with dust — something bad has happened to Manhattan again. Five twentysomething actors urgently wind their way through the wreckage, a camera crew close behind. Suddenly, someone shouts, ''Monster!'' and the following things happen almost at once: 1. The leader of the pack, a lean, scruffy actor named Michael Stahl-David, yells, ''Holy s---!'' 2. A jeep with a rocket launcher fires an empty round at a three-story-tall curtain of greenscreen at the end of the block. 3. A tank and a swarm of Army soldiers arrive, aiming more faux artillery at the defenseless neon sheet looming before them. When it's all over, everyone dusts off and gets ready to do it again.
Emerging from a doorway with a slice of pizza on a paper plate, a man in black-rimmed glasses surveys the scene on this summer evening and beams like a kid surrounded by unwrapped birthday presents. ''Isn't this, like, the greatest thing ever?'' asks J.J. Abrams.
Nearly six months later, his giddy rhetorical question is getting a literal response from moviegoers as Cloverfield finally invades theaters. Using footage captured on one character's home-video camera, the film tells the story of friends scrambling to escape the Big Apple after an outraged behemoth begins smashing up the joint. As nifty as that might sound to monster-movie fans, this creature feature boasts few marketable assets. It has no stars. It is not a remake of a sci-fi classic or an adaptation of a beloved comic book. Its director, Matt Reeves, hasn't made a movie since the 1996 David Schwimmer-Gwyneth Paltrow dud, The Pallbearer. And yet Cloverfield arrives with blockbuster expectations thanks to the reputation of its producer Abrams, the TV impresario behind Alias and Lost and the director of Mission: Impossible III.
And, of course, there was the trailer. On July 3, 2007, a robo-nutty nation showed up for the opening weekend of Transformers and beheld a teaser for an untitled mystery movie in which a going-away party for a marketing exec who's headed to Tokyo (Stahl-David) is interrupted by tremors and an ominous roar. The revelers rush up to the roof and see fiery projectiles arcing through the sky. Then they go out onto the street and are nearly bowled over by the head of the Statue of Liberty. The end. For a lot of filmgoers, the ensuing buzz storm — further fed by cryptic, clue-packed websites, a poster of a monster-ravaged skyline, and little comment from Camp Abrams — nearly upstaged the summer movie season itself. What was that thing?
and a reboot of the company's flagship property, Now that Abrams' movie has revealed itself, the new burning questions are these: Has viral buzz infected the mainstream? And can the film possibly live up to its tease? With a budget of just $25 million, Cloverfield doesn't need to rake in much clover to turn a profit. Or, in the words of Paramount vice chairman and marketing chief Rob Moore: ''It's not like if it doesn't work we're going to shoot ourselves in the head.'' But Cloverfield can't afford to be a fiasco, either. Paramount, slowly shedding its ho-hum creative image under chairman Brad Grey, signed Abrams to an exclusive film-producing pact in 2006, hoping he could bring nervy-cool new energy to the studio. Over the past 18 months, Abrams has set up at least eight projects at Paramount, including the comedies Morning Glory and Men Making MusicStar Trek (click to see a Sneak Peek report and photo of the new starship Enterprise). Now is probably not the best time for Abrams to court bad buzz, and he's aware of the stakes. ''If the movie fails,'' he says simply, ''I take full responsibility.''
To understand where Cloverfield came from, you first must understand the thing about the boxes. J.J. Abrams loves boxes. If you're a fan of his TV shows, you know this. There was the mystery box owned by the Goth roommate on Felicity; any number of Rambaldi doomsday devices on Alias; and the Hatch buried on the Island on Lost. Cloverfield director Reeves, who co-created Felicity with Abrams and has known him since adolescence, recalls how back in the day Abrams would build boxes in his office for the sheer enjoyment of it. ''The very idea of a box, and wondering what's inside a box, is just as engaging — if not more so — to J.J. than the actual contents of a box,'' says Reeves. ''Basically, it's this: J.J. loves mystery.''
He also loves movie monsters. In the summer of 2006, Abrams was in Tokyo stumping for M:I-3 when he stopped in a bunch of toy stores with one of his three kids, Henry, then 7. At each, they saw not just one box containing a Godzilla doll, but boxes and boxes of Godzilla dolls. Dazzled by this loving display of old-school sci-fi, Abrams was overwhelmed by nostalgia — and inspired to make a monster movie of his own. ''I figured it probably wasn't something a studio wanted to rush into,'' Abrams says, citing Roland Emmerich's 1998 disappointment, Godzilla, and Peter Jackson's expensive 2005 wash, King Kong. ''But it still felt like a valid idea. The question was, how do you make it relevant and new?'' Abrams derived a solution from his belief that a monster movie could be a ''safe and fanciful way'' to process post-9/11 jitters, and his fascination with what he calls our ''age of self-documentation.'' ''I started to wonder: If I were at a party with friends, and a monster the size of a skyscraper showed up, and someone started recording it with their cell phone or video camera — what would that look like?''
But more than anything, the movie taking shape in Abrams' head seemed like the kind of visceral, cinematic fun that shaped his pop sensibility as a kid, and the kind of lean-and-mean filmmaking fun he had shooting Super-8 movies as a teen, a passion he shared with Reeves and another childhood friend-turned-collaborator, producer Bryan Burk. ''Our feeling was that it was exactly the kind of movie we wished we could have seen when we were 13,'' says Burk.
Abrams pitched his idea to Paramount execs Grey and Brad Weston in the fall of 2006. They dug it — especially when he promised to bring it in for under $30 million. He also impressed them by outlining an ambitious marketing plan, one that would be cloaked in secrecy. He even wanted to keep the movie's very existence under wraps until the debut of the teaser, which he'd already sketched out. ''When I was a kid, a trailer was the first place I ever heard about a movie,'' he says. ''I just thought the greatest thing in the world, the thing that would just blow my mind, would be if I saw a trailer for a movie that totally intrigued me but I had never heard of before.''
In April 2007, Abrams learned that in order to get Cloverfield's teaser hitched to Transformers, the filmmakers would have to submit something to Paramount ASAP. Problem was, filming hadn't started yet. In fact, Cloverfield's screenwriter, Drew Goddard, wasn't even finished with the movie's script due to the demands of his day job as a coexecutive producer on Lost. So instead of cobbling something together from existing footage, as most filmmakers do, Abrams & Co. awarded the teaser a shoot of its own. According to Reeves, ''a large part of our 12-week prep for the whole movie was used just to prepare for the teaser.'' The actors, who had auditioned for the film without even knowing it was a monster movie, felt crunched too. ''We were like, 'What? We don't even have a script!' They gave us a couple pages of outline and we just went with it,'' says Odette Yustman, whose character spends most of the movie trapped in her apartment awaiting rescue. Improvising proved to be a blessing for the crew. The film ''had a lot of complicated logistical issues,'' says Reeves. ''How do we do the special effects? How do we make it all look naturalistic? How do we edit? We used the trailer as a workshop; the experience taught us how to make the movie.''
Paramount exec Rob Moore had the idea to pique curiosity by forgoing a title and ending the trailer with only Abrams' name and a date: 1-18-08. ''It was all about using showmanship to elevate the profile of a movie that had none,'' he says. (In the movie, ''Cloverfield'' is a military code name for the videotape that holds the film's story. Goddard, who chose the title, declines to explain its significance. ''I've never told anyone my reasons — not even J.J.,'' he says.) But has the teaser raised expectations that can't be fulfilled? Abrams acknowledges that this kind of marketing risks inviting ''the din of Snakes on a Plane.'' Indeed, immediately after the teaser's release, the online world was rife with speculation about the movie's plot — and skepticism about how cool the monster would be. ''If the worst thing that happens is that the trailer made people get too excited, I'll take that over the alternative of nobody caring at all,'' says Abrams. Adds Moore: ''What the teaser promised was a unique experience. When you see the movie, you will get that unique experience.''
The earliest reviews would seem to agree. Last week, Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News declared Cloverfield ''utterly brilliant.'' (EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum is also a fan, if not quite as fervid; see her Cloverfield review.) Less clear is how audiences will respond to the film's intensity, as well as its ending, which Reeves tweaked in late December for clarity and tone. But Abrams has no regrets — except, perhaps, being the only name on the marquee. If the film is a success, he hopes that those who made his monster-movie dream come true will get their proper credit. And if it's not a success? ''When Lost came out and ABC sold it with my name, I remember thinking, 'If this fails, that's going to be kind of embarrassing.' But I also thought I should consider myself lucky to be even worried about something like that at all,'' he says. ''If my stock goes down, so be it. It's a gamble I'm willing to make if it means being able to say, 'Wow! We actually get to make this stuff.'''
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